Hello all! I have a question here regarding the baking procedure. I apologize in advance for how long this post will be and also thank in advance anyone who replies!
I am a student studying 3D modeling for video games and I'm in the middle of a pretty big project/portfolio piece in school: a diorama that consists of numerous big and small models with their own individual textures. I am pretty comfortable with the general workflow of things; High poly, then low poly, then unwrapping, then texturing and finally rendering in the game engine, but the one thing that i dread and have nightmares about with each model is BAKING. I hate baking because i don't think i fully understand the fundamentals behind it, and online schooling has not helped too much with specific questions like this. So my question for everyone here is what is the proper path to baking your high poly model onto the low? And what are some quick fixes to the endless possibility of baking issues?
For example: i struggled for HOURS trying to bake a custom Trident of Poseidon, i ran into every possible issue in 3DS and Substance, getting uglier and uglier bakes. I realized part of it was due to me not being able to reset the XForm on my model (thats a separate problem i haven't entirely figured out, i just was unable to reset the XForm on the high poly, had to reimport it completely and it worked that way) but also part of the issue was my low poly pieces were not EXACTLY in the right place where the high poly equivilant was. Does that matter so much? is there any threshold at all with how much a low poly can jut out/ be buried inside a high poly?
Also another example, after finally figuring out the trident i tried to make another simpler piece for my scene: a fire brazier. a simple rectangular piece with minor grooves and angles, a round half sphere burning area, and some decoration on the sides. modelling the high and low were super easy, and i positioned them exactly on top of each other. Unwrapped it beautifully, and almost nothing low poly was jutting out of the high poly. I go to bake in substance and i got back a horrible result of a skewed, warped decoration and a not so round burner. i go back to 3ds and fix it up a bit, removing my decoration from the low poly thinking ok i'll bake it on like my instructor said. i als adjust the round burner some more, and the bake is only slightly less ugly, the decoration on all 4 sides was still skewed but not as ugly, and the burner was still not a perfect round surface, despite ZERO jutting out by the low poly. i opted just to texture my low poly without baking as the shape high or low poly was very simple geo and there was virtually zero difference in look between high and low poly.
what i learned this semester in school is first we make a highly detailed high poly, then remove all unnecessary verts and just keep the silhouette, then unwrap the low, then we generate smoothing groups from UV shells, then throw a weighted normals mod onto it, then finally reset xform, collapse all modifiers, and export the low and the high separately making sure to name them *name*_low and *name*_high respectively. then in Substance's bake settings, we select the high poly to be baked on to the low, ad ensure "by mesh name" is checked. in theory, that should give a perfect bake, provided all pieces line up in 3ds.
to tie all of this together (im so sorry for the essay i posted!) What is (if any) the sweet spot of low poly positioning under the high poly? how much can stick out? how deeply burried into the high poly should the low poly be? does the high poly also need to be UV unwrapped? Are any of the steps i mentioned that i learned above TOTAL bologne?
Thank you so much for any who read all this and thanks in advance to any solutions or advice!!
